To continue with my game awards, today’s post is going to concentrate on detective games. I am a huge Poirot fan, and I have been hungering for a good detective game. There are a few Poirot games, but they all suck. There were two recent ones done by the same company that other people loved, but that I really could not stand. I played the demo for both.
Side note: I really wish that devs would use source material other than Death on the Nile and Murder on the Orient Express. I know that they are two of the most well-known Poirot novels and have big casts of characters, but my god, they have been done to death. Controversial opinion: they are not the best of the novels.
At any rate, the games reviewed very positively, which is unfathomable to me. Not only are they not very faithful to the source material, they aren’t good detective games. Or am I expecting too much from detective games? I don’t think I am. If you’re going to adapt the books into games, they should be recognizable as Poirot games.
In addition to those two demos, I have played several detective games this year. I gave an award to one in my last post, and I’m going to give awards to two in this post as well. I just reread what I wrote aobut them, and I stand by my assessment. Hm. What am I going to call the awards and which am I going to tackle first?
The game that taxed my brain a bit too much, but was ultimately very satisfying
The Roottrees are Dead (Evil Trout Inc.)
I did not get along with this game when I first tried it out. Basically, a candy mogul and his family died in a plane crash. A mysterious person visited me (a private investigator) and wanted me to piece together the very complicated family tree. It’s a thin premise, but there doesn’t really need to be more than that to send me off to the races.
The game is set in 1998, which means the earlier days of the internet. My tools for looking up all the Roottrees are limited. There is a Google-like search engine, yes, but I have to be very specific about what I’m looking up. It’s incredible that Evil Trout Inc. came up with their own search engine for this game.
This was one of my frustrations with the game, though (to continue my theme of frustrating flaws in games I otherwise really like)–the limitations of the search engine. One reason the game is set in 1998, I think, is specifically for the ability to limit the search engine. If it were set in the last five years, for example, they would have had to have a search engine that was nearly limitless.